


The Firelands

by Vana



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Gen, Lots, davos is old, don't say i ain't warn you, just the usual atmospheric arglebargle, melisandre gets laid, shireen is somewhere, stannis dies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-12
Updated: 2019-03-12
Packaged: 2019-11-16 05:38:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18088466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vana/pseuds/Vana
Summary: Once there was a priestess from the Shadow who came into the Light.





	The Firelands

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this in 2015 and deleted it a few days later but decided to repost it. Thank you to C. for the beta, way back then. Thank you to Jenn for reminding me of it! CW: Angst, death, aging, endgame and all that fun stuff.

**i. Home**

 

She is barely newborn, pink and shining in the sun of her country. 

The name of the country doesn’t matter. It’s dead now.

Not _gone_. Not sunk back into the oceans or destroyed by fire from the sky. Nor the gods.

The gods had nothing to do with her home — square and gold, round and green, her city by a steel sea and an inkwell orchard.

But her city died. Mourning in the ashes, Melony wept bitterly, sometimes howling, sometimes whispering. Dirty tears and blood tracked into the lines of care already etched on her young face.

Into this extremity hove two figures. Melony took them for ghosts. Worse things than ghosts had already been here.

But no, they were of the living, of a sort. A man with a harlequin face and a woman masked in cherrywood ensnared the heartbroken girl her in their voices, foreign and silken. Find me my family, she asked them. Will you help me find my home?

In return, the two whispered a word to her, something she had never heard in the green and gold city, in the blueberry bramble of childhood. First the man let it slide from his tongue like a serpent, and then came the woman, her voice ululating after. _Asshai_.

 

**ii. Asshai**

 

Only red remained in Asshai-by-the-Shadow — the only color not swallowed up by the blackness. It had driven mad lesser minds than Melony’s to hunt the Shadow as the white hart, as the gold in the rock, as the single scented rose in the bramble briar. Men searched for the source of the Shadow and they returned to the black city aged ten years in one moon.

When you asked them what they had seen, they opened their mouths and the tongues were slit horribly. One side of these wretch tongues choked out “The Great Other” and the other uttered “The Lord of Light.”

These unfortunates were abandoned on the streets and soon were killed by the cruel diseases or the crueler bands of evildoers that stalked the black city. At night, the only light was from the shadowhunters’ scared eyes, and the coins whose faces they licked thirstily with their forked tongues in their last desperate bid to die without pain.

But the Shadow always came. It took them away, and when it took them, they screamed.

The screams were everywhere.

 

**iii. The Sept**

 

_I am the Crone, I am the Maiden. I am the Mother._

 You are the Crone. You are the Maiden. You are the Mother.

_Love is not strong enough. I must be stronger than love._

You are not strong enough. You must be as strong as divine love.

_Love is not strong enough. I am not strong enough…_

Every night Melony said the words, prayed the prayers to the women in the cold white stone sept a league past Asshai-by-the-Shadow.

Every day the septas said she was not ready.

Once again the girl — budding into womanhood now but shy, so shy, so ignorant of her body that when her blood came she thought she was dying — wept on a black ground, only her red hair and the blood flame in the wood. She was doused, she thought. Her wish to serve the gods — _the Crone the Maiden the Mother —_ would end no more fruitfully than her wish to return to her home. Oh, green-gold city! Where are your orchards now? Where are your roads of sand? Where is your sparkling spring? The gods bade me come here, and when I came, they sent me away. Humiliated me and banished me.

That night all her tears were wrung from her. She slept, and in the morning, God beat down her door.

 

**iv. The Temple**

 

Oh, certainly, he was in the guise of a priest, with tattooed face and burnt skin, and robes of crimson so red she thought he had soaked them in blood.

She should have been scared. Would he, standing at the foot of her rough bed, approach and tear her dress, force himself upon her? Would her first lovemaking be with a wandering, filthy red priest who smelled of flame and smoke?

When she was taken, it was by the Red God himself.

“Tell me his name,” growled the priest as she shuddered and writhed in her divinity, ecstasy, surrender. This god loved like a white wildfire. This god ignited her body and her senses. In a distant corner of her mind she thought of the septas who had denied her. _You are not strong enough. You must be stronger than love._

She was nearly mad with love now.

The priest stood, arms out, fire blazing, eyes aglow and his voice cutting through the commotion in her head.

_“What is his name?”_

_“R’hllor,”_ she cried, at the peak of her peak. The name was seared into her like a brand.

Melony awoke on a pallet. She was alone and it was daylight.

She felt, gingerly, of her body. Was she burnt? Soiled? Had her lover cleansed her? Where was he?

She was pure, clean, untouched. Her maidenhead was intact.

_Then what…?_

The priest returned with water and something else, too, in a vial. He tipped it into the water. It turned purple-red, darker and richer than wine.

“Drink,” he commanded.

When she drained her glass, the priest smiled. A wide, red smile of pride and love.

“That would have killed you before last night,” he remarked. “You are his now. You have heard him speak his name, and you felt his fire within you. You must have a new name.”

The priest gazed into the fire — ever-present, he seemed to be able to conjure it from his sleeves. _I should like to learn that,_ Melony thought.  _And never be cold again._

“You will be Melisandre of Asshai,” he said, staring into the very whitest, hottest, heart of the flame. “Melisandre of the Fire, Melisandre who escaped the Shadow. You will carry this flame to the corners of the world. You will serve the Lord of Light all your days.”

 

**v. Dragonstone**

 

There had never been a man who had given her power like Stannis Baratheon.

All Melisandre’s life, she had been found. Passive, lost first, before someone came to find her and rescue her... The man with the harlequin face, the woman in the mask. The priest in his bleeding robes and his charred arms. Even R’hllor had _found_ her, he had claimed her, he had taken her.

She had been tossed from god to god, from savior to savior.

Now, she was the one who had found the Warrior of Light. Now _she_ was the anchor that men dropped to keep them safe. She was the tall stone tower to which they clung and she was the wave upon which they were tossed. King Stannis, his scarred little daughter, the young and laughing lord Renly, the Onion Knight who carried his own bones in a bag, the seven sons upon whom he doted — all these were ships on the tide of Melisandre _,_ who served the Lord of Light.

And the Queen Selyse — she too served the Lord.

The queen had been a believer without gods until Melisandre arrived. Devotion with nothing to hold, divine love without a worthy recipient, until the priestess lit the fire and showed her R’hllor in his glory.

“R’hllor is the true god,” Melisandre heard Selyse telling Stannis once. The king ground his teeth but was bound by duty to grant his wife an audience. “R’hllor is real and we are only crawling on him. We are insects on the great red hind.”

It infuriated the Prince who was Promised. But then, what didn’t?

Even Melisandre, when she touched the man’s arm, stepped gracefully out of her robes and told him that it was time finally to make a son he had always wished for, was met with a frown. 

He scowled through their lovemaking — the sacred rites she had studied all feeling more ecstatic than ever before — and when he spent his seed he gnashed his jaws together so violently Melisandre thought he would shatter all his teeth.

One dark-moon night, she remembered the priest.

“Tell me his name,” she murmured to King Stannis as she took him again, in a chamber high in his foamy castle of the dragons. He was hard as stone beneath her and her crimson hair bled a red river across his bare chest.

His eyes flew open. They were dilated with terror. Was R’hllor so fearsome to one who did not yet believe?

“The one true God,” she said gently. “What is his name?”

“You know his name, woman,” Stannis gritted out. He breathed in a long gulp of air. His chest expanded under her hands and she could feel the ribs, each next to each, pressing up against her palms.

_Lord grant this man faith,_ Melisandre of Asshai prayed fervently as they coupled and finished. _Grant him the sight to see, the wisdom to know his fate, and the strength to see it out._

Later when she lifted herself off him, leaving him limp and wrung in the cooling bedclothes, she tried to watch him until he fell asleep. But she could see his stony blue gaze on her even as she finally retreated.

 

**vi. The Wall**

 

The closer she was to the Others, and the force that was the Shadow embodied and moving, the more powerful she became. R’hllor’s fires took her body and soul here, dragged her into the flames and threw her from future to future without thought for her own survival or sanity.

For a fevered, delusional time she was the Night’s Queen and Stannis their blue-eyed king, with nails so sharp now from the cold that they bled her when they met in her bed.

Later, too, she was a wolf, a red wolf prowling with the grey and white sisters and brothers of the far northern wastes. The white wolf with the eyes of flame kept her by his side: his mate, his property. Any who came near met his sharp teeth and claws.

Devan Seaworth had waked her, shaking her heavily and calling her name in terror. “Lady Melisandre,” he gasped when her eyes focused upon his brown face. “I will summon the King." 

“ _No_ ,” Melisandre snapped, so sharply it was like a slap. “No, thank you, Devan,” she amended. “There is no need to disturb the king.”

She did not want Stannis to know she had been roaming with Jon Snow in her fever dream, melting White Walkers with their shared breath and their animal joy. The black-haired bastard Lord Commander feared her and hated her, yet in the body of his wolf and she in her red coat they were a pair who hunted and ranged together, and kept the night’s freeze out together.

When Stannis rode for Winterfell, Melisandre stayed behind. Every night she looked for a glimpse of her king in the fire. And every night snow fell and wolves rose to pad over the whiteness with her, silent as ghosts.

 

**vii. King’s Landing**

 

“Men call you the Onion King.”

“Men call you the Red Witch. Do you pay mind to a name?” The Regent was supremely tired. Onions were all right as long as Stannis had been living, but since the battle, Davos had come to dread the stench. They smelled like putrid flesh. The skin peeled in papery layers off his king’s face. One by one by one. Thin years peeling off to reveal … only a body, not a god.

And underneath, the soft, rotting pulp. 

Melisandre rose. Even now, she was more grand than any a queen who had ever sat the Iron Throne or worn a circlet of cold metal. Margaery and Cersei had each knelt and fallen. Daenerys Stormborn had met her death on dragonback in the spring storms that rained lightning down over the sodden land. Selyse had perished with Stannis at her side. The Blackfyre pretender had been sacrificed to the Red God, his blue hair catching last, igniting long after the rest of him was already burned and screaming.

Chubby, innocent King Tommen had been cut down on the road to Dorne to avenge his sister.

Worst of all, the scarred, kind, beautiful Princess Shireen lay in a sound sleep, the sleep from which singers said little Bran Stark had been waked by a raven with a thousand eyes, and one.

Every night, Davos prayed to the Seven that the raven would come and wake the princess. _You were my daughter,_ he thought, _though it was not my wife who birthed you._

Every night, Melisandre stoked the fire in her chamber.

_You are the daughter of my Warrior of Light, but his light has gone out_ , she thought. _So it is you who must carry the flame now._

There was no one left but Davos, and he wore Stannis’ fiery crown only out of devotion to the man who had forged it. The council knelt to him grudgingly, waiting, hoping.

Westeros would not kneel for a sleeping queen, nor yet an Onion King.

The red priestess rose up to her full height and seemed to tower over Davos, upon whose bones and height inevitable age had taken its toll.

“Ser Davos, you are no king to me.”

“Nor to myself, my lady. I only hold the crown safe until I place it atop Shireen’s head with my two hands, broken though they be.”

She regarded the Onion King with a long look. “Your days are almost at an end,” she told him. “But before you die — and you will die, as your king and sons before you — she will wake.”

“How can you possibly know that?” Davos said. Tired, yet still bent to challenge the Red Woman all his days. “Did you foretell it in your fire?”

“No,” Melisandre answered. She saw the surprise in Davos’ mild, cloudy brown eyes. She raised an eyebrow at him — the closest she would ever come to a curtsey before the Hand of the King who wore his lost lord’s crown.

She opened the thousand eyes inside the heart’s mind she had taken from a dead woman, a bastard born with no last name, and a son of a lord of ice. All of them were inside her now, and the green and gold city, and the snow on the Iron Throne and the tinderbox of the red temple. Her god had given her all this, but it took the trust of Stannis Baratheon to make it real. She owed the dead king his daughter. A life for a life. And her own had been very long. 

“Shireen will wake, ere long, Onion Knight,” she promised again, with the voice of the red-eyed trees. “I will see to it myself.”


End file.
